Most homes with 200 amp service use far less than that at any point in time. The vast majority of people with 200 amp service never exceed 100 amps, even under surge conditions.
Using 50 amps and having a longer charge cycle would be acceptable in most cases, since most people park for a dozen or more hours in the evening. The grid can probably even handle the additional load, since it would occur in off-peak hours.
The point is moot, however, if the device is yet more snake oil.
My entire household consumes 400kWh in a given month. That includes three computers and two DVRs running 24/7, the radon system, the dryer and stove for at least an hour a day, the furnace, refrigerator, chest freezer, lights, etc...
Your computer uses almost twice as much electricity as my whole household? What do you have in that thing?
Dictionary definitions include "a sudden and rapid increase", and "a bursting with violence and loud noise, because of internal pressure".
The parent to your comment made other petty, pedantic, but incorrect distinctions too. One of the OED definitions of "detonation" is "the explosion of gunpowder". Gunpowder *does* detonate. It's the definition of a detonation.
If the device in this article can store as much power as it claims with a low internal resistance, it may not be able to explode, but it can certainly *cause* a large explosion. No combustion necessary.
Over the last 8 years, many vendors have announced 100+ lumen/watt LEDs. I have yet to see a vendor deliver on the announcement. I'd be curious to see if you could find somebody actually selling these.
The best I've seen available in bulk are supposedly 80 lumens/watt. However only half of them even come close to that, with the other half producing a dim, greenish output. Of the ones that "work", half of those seem to fail to the greenish state within a year.
The state of the white LED market is, quite frankly, depressing.
It's not a matter of whether the expense makes sense or not. For it to be a natural monopoly, additional networks have to be unable to achieve sufficient economies of scale. Multiple networks may be non-optimal (also debatable), but that doesn't make them a natural monopoly.
For it to be a natural monopoly, you would have to make assumptions:
The "desired output" is largely identical for all customers
There aren't enough customers to provide economies of scale on more than one network.
I would assert that neither of these assumptions are true.
People want different things from their last mile connections. Some people merely want voice or voice+video service. Some people want on-demand content. Some people want hagh transmission capacity. Some people only want data... Etc..
If the diversity of customer needs is high enough (it should be), the second assumption also falls. If each of the last mile providers can attract a significant portion of the market, they should each be able to achieve a customer base large enough to bring down the costs of the network that would need to be passed on to the individual users.
And lastly, proof that this is the case. We currently have a situation where most communities have multiple last mile providers with overlapping services. One or more cable companies, and an incumbent telephone company. Both of which can justify upgrading their last-mile networks to the point where it's essentially a complete rebuild. This would be impossible if the last mile were a natural monopoly.
You aren't going to have people running a cable to your house in case you might want to use it.
That's the huge flaw in your premise. Even the incumbent last mile providers don't do this. They run a cable to your house when you order service over said cable, and not a moment before that.
For many services, they will charge you the costs of that installation if you don't agree to a contract binding you to purchase that service for an extended period of time.
The only exception to this is when they run a telephone line to provide mandated E911 service in communities that require it by law.
Try ordering a leased data service, or Cable TV to a house that's never had it, or FiOS, or an alarm circuit, or whatever... See for yourself.
If Microsoft can be sued over this, who's to say that they couldn't go after every other stationary tray-loading spinning-disc-player manufacturer?
The fact that most other tray-loading drives don't scratch your discs when you move them around would probably take care of that for the other manufacturers. Along with holding the disc tightly between a spindle and a bearing, tray loading drives employ bumpers that Microsoft left out on their drives to save $0.50/console. Since the other drive makers include said bumpers, and don't scratch discs, I don't think they need to worry too much if Microsoft is held liable for what their product does.
Any modern tray loading CD drive clamps the disc between the spindle and a bearing in the top of the case. This disc is suspended several millimeters away from any solid surface. Short of creating enormous G-force on the disc by rotating the drive at a high level of acceleration, the worst you would expect from your average cheap-ass tray loading drive is to scratch the very outer edge of the disc where there isn't any data anyway. People with CD/DVD drives mounted in external USB cases move them around with discs in them all the time, and those drives weren't even designed with portable mounting in mind. When making a toy that is likely to be used by children who will knock it over, it doesn't seem unreasonable that Microsoft would include something along the level of the bottom end of the reliability spectrum rather than establishing a new low.
The only reason people are defending Microsoft on this is because they love their XBox, and they feel an irrational need to defend it in public lest it lose market share to a competitor's console.
The video quality from Slingbox is crap. Not worth watching. And that's with the slingbox on a 20MBit symmetrical link. I don't even want to think about what it would look like on something like a cable modem with crappy upstream.
On a tiny Treo screen, it was *almost* watchable. Almost.
Centralize, yes. Simplify, yes. Ensure a certain quality of apps? Sorry, no. There are many, many shitty apps in the App Store. Some crash. Some crash the phone's OS and require a restart. Some just look and feel like crap. The certain level of quality they ensure is "The developer has paid the $100, and the App doesn't get us into trouble with AT&T". That's it. End of story.
Did you read the article? It isn't the obvious answer. If you only see half the story it's obvious, but he also had a political axe to grind. Did he leak the story because he didn't want the Justice department to break the law, or did he leak the story because he wanted to affect the presidential election.
Choice quotes from the article:
Tamm grew frustrated when the story did not immediately appear. He was hoping, he says, that Lichtblau and his partner Risen (with whom he also met) would figure out on their own what the program was really all about and break it before the 2004 election. He was, by this time, "pissed off" at the Bush administration, he says. He contributed $300 to the Democratic National Committee in September 2004, according to campaign finance records.
The source did not know precisely what was going onâ"he was, in fact, maddeningly vague
By mutual agreement, he resigned in late 2006. He was out of a job and squarely in the sights of the FBI. Nevertheless, he began blogging about the Justice Department for liberal Web sites.
If he genuinely did this because he wanted justice, then great... But it seems like he had only passing hints that something illegal might be going on... He didn't know any specifics.. So was he trying to "do the right thing"? Or was he using his security clearance for political reasons?
I don't know that I'd defend the lack of the feature as a "good idea", but I will say that I've had Copy and Paste on my phone (Treo 650/700) for years, and I've never used it. Not even once.
Seems like a no-brainer type of feature to include, but if it went away on my phone, I can't say I'd miss it at all. The whole "issue" seems to be overblown.
The article claims that the rate of deaths for climbing Everest is 1.2% over the last century.
I don't know what the rate of death is for football injuries, but I'm certain that if it wasn't several orders of magnitude lower than 1.2% I'd either have heard a lot more about it in the news, or there would be a lot fewer people playing football.
Oh, achievements! Several times so far in Naxx, one of the people in the group gotten a Battleground achievement during a boss fight. (The 300k damage one). I got my "100 Emblems of Valor" achievement when I got my 96'th emblem. I got my "100 Stone Keepers Shards" achievement when I got my 106th shard...
No, they're not critical issues. It just seems like they rushed the game out the door instead of taking the extra time that the game needed to get the level of polish you expect from Blizzard.
If you're using quest helper, it's easy to miss errors in quest descriptions. It's just as easy for you to miss spelling errors as it was for the developers... Perhaps you're not far in? The starting zones were great. I didn't hit my first real bug until Grizzly Hills, and things didn't get really sloppy until Sholazar Basin. Some of the things are subtle too. Are you watching enemy cast bars? If not, you wouldn't notice if they're casting "none" at you. Seen "%u" win the arena competition in Zul'Drak yet? Do you have gathering skills? Well if you don't you wouldn't notice that your tracking will show you nodes that are in a phase you don't have access to anymore. That isn't by any means a comprehensive list...
I don't know how you can't have noticed the vehicle issue though. Sometimes the controls are an overlay that replaces your normal buttons. Sometimes they're a pet bar. Sometimes they're a new thing that is "sortof" a pet bar. Sometimes they have hotkeys, and sometimes they don't...
They did seem to get almost all of the game-breaking issues out of the game before release, and I do thing that overall Wrath is fantastic... But I can't see how anybody who's spent more than a few days at 80 can say it's "polished".
The longevity of the game is almost purely social (or in some people's cases anti-social).
It's like hanging out in the same diner with your friends every night. If you just do the same quests over and over, you get bored and quit the game. The people who are "addicted", though, aren't usually sticking around for the grind. They're just there for the convenient forum for socialization without having to leave their house.
If it's not for you, it's not for you. But people have a wide variety of tastes. Personally, I do read books and get exercise. I also play WoW. They're not mutually exclusive. WoW simply consumes all the time that I used to spend watching TV, going to movies, and to some extent playing other videogames.
The direction Blizzard was going with Wrath is clearly an improvement on what was already a good game....
It's too bad they didn't finish it before they released it. It's missing that typical Blizzard polish. Spelling errors and other glaring issues with quest text and NPC speech (including directions that send you to the wrong place, or places that just plain don't exist instad of the correct location); items with no names so strings like (null) and "%u" and "doodad_whatever" pop up all over the place; professions with no additional recipes long before you reach the skill cap; a new vehicle system that has no fewer than four completely separate implementations and user interfaces (half of which break); add-on API functionality that doesn't work or isn't documented; zone phasing technology that needs some of the kinks worked out; achievements that you get without actually accomplishing them, or don't get when you actually do.... etc...
They needed to keep working on it for another month or two before releasing it.
It wouldn't have to do that at all. It would simply need to know that there are certain things that shouldn't get swapped out during an idle period. Or better, if the system is idle in general, don't count that time towards the decision of whether or not a page is idle enough to swap out. Or not to swap out idle pages when there's no IO...
All of these types of algorithms exist already... Just not in your operating system of choice.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Attach Enormous Coil to Car Roof.
2. Park under high voltage AC lines.
3. Profit.
(No ???. It's stupid for non-nonsensical plans anyway. Save it for things like: 1. Get "First Posts" on Slashdot. 2. ??? 3. Profit.)
(Yes, I know. Three phases. Near Zero magnetic flux, etc..)
Most homes with 200 amp service use far less than that at any point in time. The vast majority of people with 200 amp service never exceed 100 amps, even under surge conditions.
Using 50 amps and having a longer charge cycle would be acceptable in most cases, since most people park for a dozen or more hours in the evening. The grid can probably even handle the additional load, since it would occur in off-peak hours.
The point is moot, however, if the device is yet more snake oil.
My entire household consumes 400kWh in a given month. That includes three computers and two DVRs running 24/7, the radon system, the dryer and stove for at least an hour a day, the furnace, refrigerator, chest freezer, lights, etc...
Your computer uses almost twice as much electricity as my whole household? What do you have in that thing?
A combustion event, aka 'explosion'
Explosion doesn't imply combustion. Combustion doesn't imply explosion.
Dictionary definitions include "a sudden and rapid increase", and "a bursting with violence and loud noise, because of internal pressure".
The parent to your comment made other petty, pedantic, but incorrect distinctions too. One of the OED definitions of "detonation" is "the explosion of gunpowder". Gunpowder *does* detonate. It's the definition of a detonation.
If the device in this article can store as much power as it claims with a low internal resistance, it may not be able to explode, but it can certainly *cause* a large explosion. No combustion necessary.
I see what you did there.
Right or not about who's at fault, you diverted attention away from the point. The point being that red-light cameras make intersections less safe.
Over the last 8 years, many vendors have announced 100+ lumen/watt LEDs. I have yet to see a vendor deliver on the announcement. I'd be curious to see if you could find somebody actually selling these.
The best I've seen available in bulk are supposedly 80 lumens/watt. However only half of them even come close to that, with the other half producing a dim, greenish output. Of the ones that "work", half of those seem to fail to the greenish state within a year.
The state of the white LED market is, quite frankly, depressing.
It's not a matter of whether the expense makes sense or not. For it to be a natural monopoly, additional networks have to be unable to achieve sufficient economies of scale. Multiple networks may be non-optimal (also debatable), but that doesn't make them a natural monopoly.
No it isn't.
For it to be a natural monopoly, you would have to make assumptions:
I would assert that neither of these assumptions are true.
People want different things from their last mile connections. Some people merely want voice or voice+video service. Some people want on-demand content. Some people want hagh transmission capacity. Some people only want data... Etc..
If the diversity of customer needs is high enough (it should be), the second assumption also falls. If each of the last mile providers can attract a significant portion of the market, they should each be able to achieve a customer base large enough to bring down the costs of the network that would need to be passed on to the individual users.
And lastly, proof that this is the case. We currently have a situation where most communities have multiple last mile providers with overlapping services. One or more cable companies, and an incumbent telephone company. Both of which can justify upgrading their last-mile networks to the point where it's essentially a complete rebuild. This would be impossible if the last mile were a natural monopoly.
That's the huge flaw in your premise. Even the incumbent last mile providers don't do this. They run a cable to your house when you order service over said cable, and not a moment before that.
For many services, they will charge you the costs of that installation if you don't agree to a contract binding you to purchase that service for an extended period of time.
The only exception to this is when they run a telephone line to provide mandated E911 service in communities that require it by law.
Try ordering a leased data service, or Cable TV to a house that's never had it, or FiOS, or an alarm circuit, or whatever... See for yourself.
If Microsoft can be sued over this, who's to say that they couldn't go after every other stationary tray-loading spinning-disc-player manufacturer?
The fact that most other tray-loading drives don't scratch your discs when you move them around would probably take care of that for the other manufacturers. Along with holding the disc tightly between a spindle and a bearing, tray loading drives employ bumpers that Microsoft left out on their drives to save $0.50/console. Since the other drive makers include said bumpers, and don't scratch discs, I don't think they need to worry too much if Microsoft is held liable for what their product does.
This is plain bullshit.
Any modern tray loading CD drive clamps the disc between the spindle and a bearing in the top of the case. This disc is suspended several millimeters away from any solid surface. Short of creating enormous G-force on the disc by rotating the drive at a high level of acceleration, the worst you would expect from your average cheap-ass tray loading drive is to scratch the very outer edge of the disc where there isn't any data anyway. People with CD/DVD drives mounted in external USB cases move them around with discs in them all the time, and those drives weren't even designed with portable mounting in mind. When making a toy that is likely to be used by children who will knock it over, it doesn't seem unreasonable that Microsoft would include something along the level of the bottom end of the reliability spectrum rather than establishing a new low.
The only reason people are defending Microsoft on this is because they love their XBox, and they feel an irrational need to defend it in public lest it lose market share to a competitor's console.
I'll save you some time.
The video quality from Slingbox is crap. Not worth watching. And that's with the slingbox on a 20MBit symmetrical link. I don't even want to think about what it would look like on something like a cable modem with crappy upstream.
On a tiny Treo screen, it was *almost* watchable. Almost.
Centralize, yes. Simplify, yes. Ensure a certain quality of apps? Sorry, no. There are many, many shitty apps in the App Store. Some crash. Some crash the phone's OS and require a restart. Some just look and feel like crap. The certain level of quality they ensure is "The developer has paid the $100, and the App doesn't get us into trouble with AT&T". That's it. End of story.
There are plenty of crimes that have a different punishment based on intent.
Did you read the article? It isn't the obvious answer. If you only see half the story it's obvious, but he also had a political axe to grind. Did he leak the story because he didn't want the Justice department to break the law, or did he leak the story because he wanted to affect the presidential election.
Choice quotes from the article:
If he genuinely did this because he wanted justice, then great... But it seems like he had only passing hints that something illegal might be going on... He didn't know any specifics.. So was he trying to "do the right thing"? Or was he using his security clearance for political reasons?
I don't know that I'd defend the lack of the feature as a "good idea", but I will say that I've had Copy and Paste on my phone (Treo 650/700) for years, and I've never used it. Not even once.
Seems like a no-brainer type of feature to include, but if it went away on my phone, I can't say I'd miss it at all. The whole "issue" seems to be overblown.
The article claims that the rate of deaths for climbing Everest is 1.2% over the last century.
I don't know what the rate of death is for football injuries, but I'm certain that if it wasn't several orders of magnitude lower than 1.2% I'd either have heard a lot more about it in the news, or there would be a lot fewer people playing football.
Oh, achievements! Several times so far in Naxx, one of the people in the group gotten a Battleground achievement during a boss fight. (The 300k damage one). I got my "100 Emblems of Valor" achievement when I got my 96'th emblem. I got my "100 Stone Keepers Shards" achievement when I got my 106th shard...
No, they're not critical issues. It just seems like they rushed the game out the door instead of taking the extra time that the game needed to get the level of polish you expect from Blizzard.
Just not paying that much attention?
If you're using quest helper, it's easy to miss errors in quest descriptions. It's just as easy for you to miss spelling errors as it was for the developers... Perhaps you're not far in? The starting zones were great. I didn't hit my first real bug until Grizzly Hills, and things didn't get really sloppy until Sholazar Basin. Some of the things are subtle too. Are you watching enemy cast bars? If not, you wouldn't notice if they're casting "none" at you. Seen "%u" win the arena competition in Zul'Drak yet? Do you have gathering skills? Well if you don't you wouldn't notice that your tracking will show you nodes that are in a phase you don't have access to anymore. That isn't by any means a comprehensive list...
I don't know how you can't have noticed the vehicle issue though. Sometimes the controls are an overlay that replaces your normal buttons. Sometimes they're a pet bar. Sometimes they're a new thing that is "sortof" a pet bar. Sometimes they have hotkeys, and sometimes they don't...
They did seem to get almost all of the game-breaking issues out of the game before release, and I do thing that overall Wrath is fantastic... But I can't see how anybody who's spent more than a few days at 80 can say it's "polished".
The longevity of the game is almost purely social (or in some people's cases anti-social).
It's like hanging out in the same diner with your friends every night. If you just do the same quests over and over, you get bored and quit the game. The people who are "addicted", though, aren't usually sticking around for the grind. They're just there for the convenient forum for socialization without having to leave their house.
If it's not for you, it's not for you. But people have a wide variety of tastes. Personally, I do read books and get exercise. I also play WoW. They're not mutually exclusive. WoW simply consumes all the time that I used to spend watching TV, going to movies, and to some extent playing other videogames.
There are plenty of PvP activities for level 71-80 players in Wrath that grant experience now.
The specific features you listed weren't even new in WoW. Both existed (though phasing only to a limited extent) in Burning Crusade.
I don't think they're being "touted" as new... The reviewer is simply lacking background info.
The direction Blizzard was going with Wrath is clearly an improvement on what was already a good game....
It's too bad they didn't finish it before they released it. It's missing that typical Blizzard polish. Spelling errors and other glaring issues with quest text and NPC speech (including directions that send you to the wrong place, or places that just plain don't exist instad of the correct location); items with no names so strings like (null) and "%u" and "doodad_whatever" pop up all over the place; professions with no additional recipes long before you reach the skill cap; a new vehicle system that has no fewer than four completely separate implementations and user interfaces (half of which break); add-on API functionality that doesn't work or isn't documented; zone phasing technology that needs some of the kinks worked out; achievements that you get without actually accomplishing them, or don't get when you actually do.... etc...
They needed to keep working on it for another month or two before releasing it.
Takedown notices for eBay listings are served to eBay. There's no practical way for a seller to contest the take down notice directly.
Take down notices don't have to survive a challenge if you know they're never going to get challenged.
It wouldn't have to do that at all. It would simply need to know that there are certain things that shouldn't get swapped out during an idle period. Or better, if the system is idle in general, don't count that time towards the decision of whether or not a page is idle enough to swap out. Or not to swap out idle pages when there's no IO...
All of these types of algorithms exist already... Just not in your operating system of choice.